But it continues to matter in Paul’s next letter to Herlihy.
It still seems to me that the formalized life of primitives must be emotionally satisfying, if only because so many of the acts of daily life are performed in the manner of a ritual, and before witnesses. (Then I worry: Could it be that my nostalgia for that lost childhood is merely a disinclination to assume the responsibilities that becoming civilized demands? Then I answer: No. We’re still primitives. We don’t really want to be civilized. In another ten thousand years, perhaps.)…And about the hatred of America: naturally I mask it, because I mask everything. Too much importance is given the writer and not enough to his work. What difference does it make who he is and what he feels, since he is merely a machine for transmission of ideas? In reality he doesn’t exist—he’s a cipher, a blank. A spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythical personality…I don’t think a writer ever participates in anything; his pretences at it are mimetic [Not mine, Paul]…This all sounds far too serious. But you got me started.
I rather wish that I had got him started rather than Herlihy. Both Bowles and I had been influenced by Sartre’s La Nausée. Writers of any complexity are not well served in biographies by schoolteachers, particularly American ones. In 1989 Paul wrote the editor of Black Sparrow Press how displeased he was with a recent biography of himself. He quotes me as saying “that if I collaborated, half the material would be wrong, and if I didn’t, everything would be wrong. In the course of events this was beautifully borne out.” If only I had had me to advise me (!) in a similar situation where everything was wrong.
I’m mildly surprised by Paul’s intense dislike of our native land in the year 1966. It is in part the fastidious dislike of a Flaubert for the mindless cud-chewing of the middle class anywhere which can often provide fuel in the form of spleen as well as satire in such private made-up cities of the plain as my Duluth. But Paul seems uncommonly, uncharacteristically fierce in his declaration to Herlihy. But then I have never thought the idea of a mere country could ever be sufficiently coherent to hate or to love as opposed to simply observe. I suspect that Paul found unfathomable my interest in how the American experiment was turning out—as exotic to him as I found his apparent passion for the primitive world of North Africa and other places to the far south and farther east. The idea of the writer as a Promethean figure crossing like a spy the boundaries separating life and death is a splendid metaphor for his own writing at its best, but the oddly bitter note he strikes with Herlihy he never did with me. I understand the disdain of high art for mediocrity but his objection is much deeper. He once defined decadence for, I think, The New York Times as “commercialism” and “a failure of energy,” not their expected answer.
I’ve been putting my memory to work to find a vulgar root for his need to mask all things, including his dislike of his native land not too much different from that of our own American master Henry James.
Once, while Paul and I were waiting to cross Fifth Avenue, I started to go against the light. “Don’t!” he said. Since there was no traffic, I asked him why not risk it? “Because my mother did when I was a child. She simply held up her hand and said, ‘Nonsense, we have the right of way.’ I stayed on the curb and she walked into the Fifth Avenue bus. She was lucky not to be killed.” Paul never forgot that utterly mistaken concept: “We have the right of way.”
Then there was his final break with the United States. He had entertained a youth at a hotel. The young man wanted money. Paul said no. The youth departed, to be replaced by two plainclothesmen. Since Paul did not have the cash they asked for, he made a date to see them the next day. By the time they returned, if they did, Paul was on the high seas. There are more details to the story but I have forgotten them. The essential point is that the criminalizing of drugs and sex is very much a sign of that malign primitivism which has always reigned in Freedom’s Land. For Bowles, Morocco was freedom, particularly as he penetrated the high Atlas and the Sahara desert, recording music that he was certain could be traced back to Roman times, while noting down stories that go back to the early days of our race which gave us Puritan New England that also gave birth to that original mind, masked or not, of Paul Bowles whose imagination responded with civilized hatred to the sort of primitive laws the two New York plainclothesmen were eager to exploit.
Despite my own troubles with my English publisher John Lehmann or, rather, his real and sometimes imagined troubles with British censorship, I got him to take Paul’s The Sheltering Sky which had been rejected in the United States on the absurd ground that it was not a novel. Lehmann did well by the book and later with Paul’s short stories. But Lehmann was too literary an English publisher to survive the deepening twilight of the Gutenberg age, in which only a few small American presses were thriving in the dusk. One was Black Swallow Press. In 1979, they wanted to collect in one volume Paul’s stories. Paul wanted no introduction. But the publisher did. Paul was averse to the sort of academic who might latch on to such a project; then he said that he wanted me to do it…“Having respect for Vidal’s critical mind I chose him rather than taking a chance on someone the publisher might find.” I was delighted. There is nothing like having to do a critical piece not only to concentrate the mind on a subject as complex as Bowles but to work out what it is that most draws one to a given writer’s work. With Tennessee’s stories it was a tone of voice the like of which had not been heard since Mark Twain. Each was a comic genius within a dark universe that the innocent persist in calling home sweet home. Bowles proved to be something of an inhuman observer like one of those vividly colored parakeets he doted on. Or, perhaps, the spirit of one. I enjoyed all of the stories except a few at the end where he notes that he had written them on kif. I thought them not as compelling as “Pages from Cold Point” and “The Delicate Prey.” He disagreed. Over the years he’d bring this up. After all, he’d say, everything he ever wrote had been written on kif, et cetera. He was also touchy about any hint that he had been influenced by the Marquis de Sade because he had found him boring; in fact, he said, he’d never really read him. I reminded him of that afternoon in Paris when he paid a lot of money to buy the Pléiade edition of Sade.
In due course Paul scrapped the collected edition and allowed his stories to fall back into their original small editions on the ground that a number of special volumes were more remunerative than a single large one.
Both Paul and Jane, together and separately, had, according to that polymath Virgil Thomson, dowsing rods for money. Libby Holman, the blues singer who may have killed her tobacco-heir husband, financed the Bowleses for years. It seems she had paid courtesy calls on Jane as well as developing a passion for Paul’s Arab lover from Tangier. But, by and large, the principals in our curious world steered clear of each other. Paul told me that Jane had been the first to abandon their conjugal duties. She told others that he had given up first. Once in New York when Tennessee and I had been prowling together one summer night, without success, he said, “Well, I guess that just leaves the two of us.” To which he claims I replied, “Don’t be macabre.” Donald Windham, his handsome collaborator on You Touched Me, when the Bird, in a similar situation, suggested that the two of them…Windham says he said, “I deplore your taste.” Where the British—at least Bloomsbury—never ceased to have affairs with friends, colleagues, relatives, Americans of the same sort try to separate, wisely I think, sex and friendship.